Which Comes First: Confidence or Performance?
Which Comes First: Confidence or Performance?
By Dr. T. J. Tomasi, Keiser University College of Golf Senior Faculty and Director of Research
Here’s a question I’m often asked: “Which comes first: confidence that you can perform or the actual performance?” Or, stated another way, “How can I have confidence that I can shoot low scores when I haven’t shot them yet?”
The key here is the concept of confidence. There are two kinds of confidence. The first and more general is the belief in yourself, an overall self-assurance that you can handle life as it comes at you. Champions are not just confident in their chosen area of expertise; they believe in their overall ability to problem-solve. This is important because general confidence allows you to hang in there while you’re learning how to score. General confidence tides you over until your performance catches up.
The second type of confidence deals with the specific ability to shoot low scores, and this comes most directly from past performance. The lower your scores, the more confidence you have relative to shooting low scores: If I can shoot 78, why not 75? But there is a short cut to lower scores, a secret way that you can program yourself for success before you actually have it. The central nervous system can’t tell the difference between a perfectly imagined experience and a real one. If your brain waves were measured at the point of perfect imaging, they would show that you are having a multisensorial, flawlessly imagined illusion created in your mind using Direct Mental Focus. This has been documented many times in the laboratory. Thus, if you perfectly imagine the drive you want to hit or the soft pitch to a tight pin, you can “fool” your brain into thinking that you have already done it. You’ll have “been there, done that” without having been there or done that.
Eastern European coaches pioneered the technique of training their athletes to image their performance before their competitions. For example, a slalom skier, with creative imaging, would ski the course in his/her mind. Using electrodes attached to the surface of the athlete’s skin, muscular contractions were recorded, and the results showed that the athlete was using 90 percent of the muscles in his/her perfectly imagined ski runs that would have been used if the racer had been skiing for real. In effect, the central nervous system could not tell the difference between the real and the perfectly imagined. How do you perfectly imagine something you’ve never done? You must do two things: (1) create a multisensorial image of the event, one where you see it, feel it, hear it, etc.; (2) do this in a mental state of relaxation that you can practice about 20 minutes each day until it becomes a skill.
If you’d like to study with Dr. Tomasi and other PGA Master Professionals, contact The College of Golf today.
